Do you shoot Sony cameras? Here's the biggest unknown tip ever.

  This autumn I spent some time down in the West Elk mountains of Colorado. All I can say is is a very huge "wow". If you've never been there you really need to put it on the "must do" list. An amazing place that really is a photographers heaven. Like any other photographer, I was both anxious and excited to get home and begin processing my photographs. So when I did I was rather startled by what I found.

  I shoot Sony cameras. Right now that consists of a Sony A77 and a Sony A550 as my backup camera. There's a few things inside Sony cameras which sets them apart from others; most notably is what is called "DRO", basically it stands for "Dynamic Range Optimization". It is basically leased technology from a company named Apical  and Nikon uses their technology as well, the difference however is that Nikon, unlike Sony, didn't provide them a "chip" which from my understanding basically fine tunes things. Now I know, this is really in the weeds stuff here but hang with me. 

  Now I imagine most photographers workflow these days consists of basically this;

*Download photos to computer

*Open Lightroom

*Import photos

*Process

*Maybe touch up in Photoshop

*Save

That "open in Lightroom" thing though got me. It got me good. When I did this, I noticed right away a complete loss of color and luminescence. I've always noticed it before but it was really never that big of a deal. However for these photos it was. Gone was the "shimmering effect" the Aspen once had and how they glowed. Lightroom was essentially zeroing out every single thing as far as settings went with my RAW files. Flat out, it wasn't reading the information embedded into the RAW files as far as creative styles go or anything as far as DRO went. What I would see on my cameras LCD would look very different than what I saw when I imported them into Lightroom. No, I don't shoot RAW+JPEG, only RAW. I couldn't figure out why this happening so I went digging.  I found a few threads here and here over on dpreview and flickr which touched on this happening but not a whole lot and then I saw someone mention "Sony IDC". A light bulb went off. 

  

  Like most photographers, the software that comes with our cameras we sort of consider "just there". In fact, I would think most never even bother to install the stuff. After all, we have the latest and greatest software from Adobe. Who needs factory junk which hardly has anything included in it, right? Right. Well....no, not right, in fact....very wrong. I opened up Sony IDC just to see what would happen, expecting nothing at all and just the same thing really. Boring software and no real fine tuning tools. Boy, did I get a shock. Right away I noticed a huge difference. We're talking massive. Everything that was recorded from the time of capture in my camera was retained in full. Everything. All the luminosity was there, the fine detail with the DRO, the shimmering of the Aspen and their colors when I saw them. All there. All retained. Needless to say I was rather elated and excited.

Click for larger size

Click for larger size

  Since finding this out I have redone my workflow entirely and now use Lightroom as a more of "in the weeds" app that my go to app for editing. My workflow used to look like this;

*Import photos into Lightroom
*Process in Lightroom
*Export out as a 16 bit TIFF
*Final editing in Photoshop
*Done

  My workflow now looks like this;

*Import RAW files into Sony IDC
*Fine tune exposure, DRO, camera settings
*Save RAW file & export out as 16 bit TIFF
*Open in Photoshop to edit, save TIFF file
*Open TIFF file in Lightroom and do in the weeds editing and keywording

  It sounds like it would take more time doesn't it but in reality it has allowed me to really cut down on the time to edit photos. I no longer have to mess around with trying to get back color from color shifting or retaining DRO which was basically futile. That being said.....

Not without caveats.

  There are some caveats when it comes to editing in Sony IDC and one has presented a real problem which I'll explain. There is a work around for this but it is kind of intensive and unless you know some things inside Photoshop (Lightroom is incapable of helping here) you may have some problems. It's times like this sites like YouTube come in very handy with video tutorials.


  Sony IDC has issues when it comes to 16 bit TIFF files and I haven't quite figured out why. It may be in the way the files are written themselves and I really need to contact Sony about this and thus far I have never heard this mentioned anywhere. Basically, when you export out a RAW files as a 16 bit TIFF, dithering can occur in skies. It's rather odd considering this shouldn't be happening at all and is basically 8 bit behavior and what you would find with JPEG images and as far as I'm able to tell, it only seems to happen in skies.

The work around. 

  I don't worry about how the skies look inside Sony IDC. Instead, what I do is now process the skies inside Lightroom. Things like DRO and camera settings don't matter much when dealing with a sky. I then export out that image from Lightroom to a 16 bit TIFF file. Inside Photoshop I use layer masking to bring that sky from Lightroom on to the other photo that was processed inside Sony IDC. Problem solved. This allows me to get the exact image I am looking for without the massive loss in quality due to dithering. Intensive? Perhaps. It doesn't take a lot of time however and I believe it's very much worth it. If you aren't familiar with how to use layer masks, simply Google or YouTube it. It's extremely easy and one of the most powerful editing tools in post work. One you use them, you'll always use them.


  The screen shot below is a really drastic illustration of what I am talking about. I was frustrated and was fighting with retaining DRO and adjusting the color shift inside Lightroom. I tried and failed to replicate what I saw in camera. As you can see, the oranges in the Aspen trees is basically toast, gone, as is the dynamic range from DRO which was recorded inside the RAW file from the time of capture. I opened it up in Sony IDC and there it was....all retained. The finished photograph is done using my workflow above (not the layer masking part of course as there is no sky).

Click for larger size

click for larger size

  In closing, those of you who shoot Sony may want to take a minute and take a look at your RAW files inside Sony IDC. It's a pretty huge difference and one that I think will probably surprise you.
It's worth the 5 minutes for sure. Be sure to check out my website www.jdebordphoto.com and my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/jdebordphotography  to keep up with my adventures behind the camera.

Yours,
John

Tips For Fall Photography

I thought that I would take a second and write this in hopes that maybe it helps some of you out.
Each and every year we see a lot of people write what basically is "make the most for your Fall photos" with hints, tips and tricks and what I have noticed is that much of it is the same. Polarizers, tripods, etc etc. So I thought that I would show you a little glimpse into how I shoot things. Granted, tripods and polarizers are certainly a mandatory affair. No questions asked there.

When it comes to shoot foliage such as Aspen trees and such, I think my method is probably different than a lot of peoples. This is aimed at shooting more intimate scenes, not sweeping landscapes, though it certainly can me used for that however I would say it really is dependent upon the scene itself (then again isn't everything?) Basically I start with an image that I can later correct in post work. I pretty much use Lightroom for everything these days and Photoshop only for resizing and sharpening, along with layer masking when it is called for.

When I am shooting an intimate Fall scene, I generally choose the preset of "Sunset" for my white balance on my Sony A550. I also generally underexpose by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop. Depending upon the lighting, that can drop down to much as a stop. There are a few reasons for this and for me, personally, this is one of the rare times I don't ETTR (Expose To The Right) Highlights can be easily blown within foliage especially when it comes to a scene which involves backlighting and such. The dynamic range within Autumn photography can be gigantic at times and by underexposing, this allows me to retain those highlights. When doing this the darks naturally will be darker so using a low ISO is essential which later doesn't introduce a lot of noise into the image when I am editing it in post work. By using a "sunset" white balance, the images come out very gold. Some may like their images looking like that, some may hate it, however it ensures that the saturation is generally dead on.

In postwork inside Lightroom, I will generally go ahead and just the white balance, finding the whitest point and selecting that. From there I can make adjustments and fine tune the temperature of the scene. Using the Luminance controls, I will then go in and fine tune the highlights to give the image a certain degree of "glow" in fine areas. After that I will adjust the curves and levels accordingly.

Down below is a Lightroom screen cap of the same image side by side. (it isn't finished yet and is a work in progress) It compares what I have in the camera to how I adjusted it mentioning the techniques above. I hope this will help some of you and make you think about your cameras settings this Fall.
---John